Eating Plants

Submission 58

"Growing up in the outback it was always said the kangaroo numbers were “plague like” but I don’t remember actual studies being conducted. Before social media, community gossip was how information was spread so if Joe Citizen said kangaroos were a plague, then kangaroos must be a plague. People with 4WDs invested in heavy duty bull bars to cause as much damage to whatever they hit while preventing damage to the car. It didn’t matter if bull bars could kill a child; the purpose was to kill animals so they became acceptable. This is the Australian mentality.

I never questioned this way of thinking while growing up. As an adult I started to question the obvious monopoly the Nationals party, representatives of cattle farmers, had on government regulations concerning the environment, the public perceptions, & local information sources like the media & community organisations, especially now that it’s difficult for councils & developers to hide their plans to destroy vital native habitat. The more I questioned the more I learned about animal agriculture; the realisation of how things were was absolutely heart breaking.

As an animal lover I had to accept I could no longer say that about myself if I still supported the consumption of animals & animal by-products. When I made the conscious decision to start supporting animals directly via my daily lifestyle, I also unhappily learned that Vegans tend to attract a lot of hate, especially from the country who is the largest consumer of meat products.

The misinformation about a plant based diet disseminated by the animal agricultural industry is laughable but the Australian public has been under a Murdoch monopoly for too long that they choose to be fed information rather than source it for themselves. This information has slowly led to a situation where the protection of our native wildlife is overridden by the greed of destructive industry. When did koalas, kangaroos, platypus, wombats, dingoes, etc. become disposable?"

Submission 270

“Early explorers described deep clear pools fringed with vegetation, which they revisited later to find cattlemen and sheep-herders had often claimed the land and waterholes were degraded, trodden into muddy bog-holes, and destroyed by sheep and cattle.

Rivers, streams and ephemeral water courses have run dry or been diverted, lakes and wetlands have dried out. Extraction of water through bores has decreased pressure in the Great Artesian Basin so that ancient mound springs have ceased to flow in arid zones, and bores in national parks have been shut off.

Farmers protect every drop of water for their stock.“

Submission 165

"Australian government, farmers, shooters and land developers will always count on profits who claim those lands are for them. They will blame the weather the droughts and floods, blame the natural predators dingoes and eagles, blame the kangaroos and emus for eating grass, they will lie about the whole natural native habitat because they're all pests to them, and then they will have the justification to Massacre Our Natural Native Fauna and Clear Our Native Natural Flora until there is No More. But they will rarely blame themselves."

Submission 236

"Current government drought relief policies for farmers are useless, cruel and stupid. They facilitate inconceivable suffering for both farm animals and wild animals, and ultimately for the farmers themselves.

There is no future for animal agriculture in the Australia. As climate change continues to bite, animal agriculture, and any other agriculture that fails to work with native ecosystems rather than against them, is economically and ecologically doomed.

Aside from (obviously) ending all and any slaughter of native animals, such as kangaroos, in NSW and, similarly, of ending all further removal of native habitat before it is too late, APA advocates that government drought assistance for farmers be designed to facilitate their transition to regenerative farming techniques, and that any further assistance must be dependent on being able to show they are implementing those techniques."

Submission 270

“Impacts of habitat loss (LAND-CLEARING for any number of reasons) are second only to the impacts of SHOOTING, and is complementary. The science confirms long-term persistence of kangaroos is dependent on habitat (shelter in the form of remnant vegetation and grazing opportunities). Short & Grigg (1982) reported that clearing exposed kangaroos to “the measures brought against them” by farmers, and described the devastating impact of broad-scale agriculture on kangaroo populations.

Clearing of bushland is not good for kangaroos: Arnold et al (1995) reported that after the size of remnants (kangaroos dropped out of landscapes once remnants became less than ~2ha in area), the second most important factor influencing persistence was the absence of humans. “

https://sentientmedia.org/the-problem-with-farming-animals/

“The human appetite for meat and dairy is brewing a special kind of disaster.

In mainstream media headlines, in industry-backed scientific research, and perhaps most frighteningly, in the minds of the world’s decision-makers, climate change is rarely if ever linked to the environmental impacts of intensive livestock farming. Although by now, the connection is indisputable.

New research suggests that the livestock industry is responsible for at least 37 percent of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This new number more than doubles the United Nations’ latest estimate of 14.5 percent, taking into account more than 94 different studies and key data points left out of other analyses, like the foregone carbon absorption from clearing land for livestock and feed production. As the demand for conventional meat continues to rise, emissions from the animal farming industry will drive global temperatures even higher.

There are two big problems with farming animals.

First, it is incredibly inefficient. According to a landmark study published in Science in 2018, which includes data from nearly 40,000 farms and 1,600 packaging types and retailers, animal agriculture provides just 18 percent of calories and takes up 83 percent of farmland.

Second, the scientific community can’t seem to agree on how much the livestock industry is contributing to the climate crisis. Since 2006, researchers and policymakers around the world have relied on inconsistent data and estimates, ranging from 14.5-51 percent of total GHG emissions.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is largely based on the 14.5 percent figure put out by the Food and Drug Administration (FAO) of the United Nations. Even with the FAO’s estimate, which is far too low, the recommendations are still dire. The report states that all of the consequences of climate change will be worsened if the global food system does not become more sustainable.

It has been all of four weeks since the latest IPCC report called for an overhaul of the global food system, and the UN’s warning has already disappeared from the headlines. That should come as no surprise, though. Industries like transportation and energy production frequently overshadow the huge environmental impact farming animals has on the environment.

Farming animals is both land- and carbon-intensive. Farmed animals like cows, chickens, and pigs produce large amounts of methane gas and require pastures that will be threatened by soil damage and desertification as temperatures continue to rise.

When land is cleared of forest for cattle grazing, soy, and other feed crops, it loses the potential for carbon absorption, also called carbon capture, which occurs when carbon is removed from the atmosphere by trees and stored in the soil. As a result, a net positive becomes a net negative. The carbon-absorbing forest becomes a dry, fire-prone patch of earth.

Livestock currently occupies about 45 percent of the global surface area. At the current rates of deforestation, the Amazon will not be the only ancient forest burned so the world can eat beef. In the years to come, vital habitats will be increasingly exploited to meet the global demand for meat, which the FAO projected to rise by 73 percent between 2010 and 2050.

By then, scientists believe it may be too late. The current food system is doing more harm to the environment today than at any time in recorded history, largely because of the prevalence of meat-heavy diets.

Since 1961, meat production has increased at a staggering rate. The world produces nearly five times more meat today than it did 50 years ago, about 317 million tons in 2014. The industry has increasingly relied on intensive animal farming, often called factory farming, to satisfy the steady rise in demand for animal products and artificially inflate the carrying capacity of the current food system.

Chickens were the first animals to be farmed at a large-scale. At the time, scientists believed there would be no way to continue feeding animal products to a rapidly growing human population without farming animals more efficiently. So they stuck animals in barns, crammed them in cages, and turned the farm into a well-oiled machine.

What they failed to recognize is that the diet they were feeding was just as unsustainable as the animals that came with it.

For every one human, there are about three farm animals alive today. That means there are roughly 22.5 billion more cows, chickens, goats, and pigs living on farms and in pastures around the world than would otherwise be there if nature was allowed to take its course.

It’s worth pointing out that all of these animals were brought into existence by and for humans. Farm animals are not making the climate crisis worse – we are.

As global temperatures hurtle past the current post-industrial rise of 0.8 degrees Celsius and toward the benchmark 2-degree shift that many scientists now say is inevitable, meat-eaters will be hard-pressed to pick a more climate-friendly diet.

In the meantime, the meat industry is hedging its bets on keeping the climate crisis a secret. They’re doing a pretty good job at it, too. Despite the budding cultural awareness of the link between climate change and animal agriculture, people are still eating record amounts of meat. In the United States, Europe, Britain, Australia, and Canada, the Western diet – notoriously heavy in animal products and processed foods – is contributing more to climate change than any other diet on the planet.”..

Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO 2 emissions this century

Michael B. Eisen & Patrick O. Brown

Published: February 1, 2022

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000010

Abstract

Animal agriculture contributes significantly to global warming through ongoing emissions of the potent greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, and displacement of biomass carbon on the land used to support livestock. However, because estimates of the magnitude of the effect of ending animal agriculture often focus on only one factor, the full potential benefit of a more radical change remains underappreciated. Here we quantify the full “climate opportunity cost” of current global livestock production, by modeling the combined, long-term effects of emission reductions and biomass recovery that would be unlocked by a phaseout of animal agriculture. We show that, even in the absence of any other emission reductions, persistent drops in atmospheric methane and nitrous oxide levels, and slower carbon dioxide accumulation, following a phaseout of livestock production would, through the end of the century, have the same cumulative effect on the warming potential of the atmosphere as a 25 gigaton per year reduction in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, providing half of the net emission reductions necessary to limit warming to 2°C. The magnitude and rapidity of these potential effects should place the reduction or elimination of animal agriculture at the forefront of strategies for averting disastrous climate change.

Introduction

The use of animals as a food-production technology has well-recognized negative impacts on our climate. The historical reduction in terrestrial biomass as native ecosystems were transformed to support grazing livestock and the cultivation of feed and forage crops accounts for as much as a third of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions to date [1, 2]. Livestock, especially large ruminants, and their supply chains, also contribute significantly to anthropogenic emissions of the potent greenhouse gases (GHGs) methane and nitrous oxide [3–5].

Solving the climate crisis requires massive cuts to GHG emissions from transportation and energy production. But even in the context of large-scale reduction in emissions from other sources, major cuts in food-linked emissions are likely necessary by 2075 to limit global warming to 1.5°C [6]. While a reduction of food-linked emissions can likely be achieved by increasing agricultural efficiency, reducing food waste, limiting excess consumption, increasing yields, and reducing the emission intensity of livestock production [7–12], they are not anticipated to have the same impact as a global transition to a plant-rich diet [5, 6].

Nutritionally balanced plant-dominated diets are common, healthy and diverse [13–17], but are rarely considered in comprehensive strategies to mitigate climate change [18], and there is controversy about their viability and the magnitude of their climate benefit [19]. One source of this discordance is that widely cited estimates of livestock contributions to global warming [4, 5, 20] account only for ongoing emissions, and not for the substantial and reversible warming impact of historical land use change [1, 21].

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimates that emissions from animal agriculture represent around 7.1 Gt CO2eq per year [5], 14.5% of annual anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, although this is based on outdated data and likely now represents and underestimate [20], and recent estimates [1] suggest that on the order of 800 Gt CO2 equivalent carbon could be fixed via photosynthesis if native biomass were allowed to recover on the 30% of Earth’s land surface current devoted to livestock production. Thus, crudely, eliminating animal agriculture has the potential to reduce net emissions by the equivalent of around 1,350 Gt CO2 this century. To put this number in perspective, total anthropogenic CO2 emissions since industrialization are estimated to be around 1,650 Gt [2].

However, a substantial fraction of the emissions impact of animal agriculture comes from methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), which decay far more rapidly than CO2 (the half-lives of CH4 and N2O are around 9 and 115 years, respectively), and recent studies have highlighted the need to consider these atmospheric dynamics when assessing their impact [22–24]. Of critical importance, many of the beneficial effects on greenhouse gas levels of eliminating livestock would accrue rapidly, via biomass recovery and decay of short-lived atmospheric CH4, and their cooling influence would be felt for an extended period of time.

Our goal here was to accurately quantify the full impact of current animal agriculture on the climate, taking into account the currently unrealized opportunities for emission reduction and biomass recovery together, and explicitly considering the impact of their kinetics on warming. Our approach differs from other recent studies [25, 26] in that we did not attempt to predict how global food production and consumption might change with growing populations, economic development, advances in agriculture, climate change and other socioeconomic factors. Nor do we tackle the social, economic, nutrition and agricultural challenges inherent to such a large change in global production.

We used publicly available, systematic data on livestock production in 2019 [27], livestock-linked emissions [3, 27], and biomass recovery potential on land currently used to support livestock [1] to predict how the phaseout of all or parts of global animal agriculture production would alter net anthropogenic emissions. We then used a simple climate model to project how these changes would impact the evolution of atmospheric GHG levels and warming for the rest of the century.

We calculated the combined impact of reduced emissions and biomass recovery by comparing the cumulative reduction, relative to current emission levels, of the global warming potential of GHGs in the atmosphere for the remainder of the 21st century under different livestock replacement scenarios to those that would be achieved by constant annual reductions in CO2 emissions.

Results

Modeling the effect of eliminating animal agriculture on GHG levels

We implemented a simple climate model that projects atmospheric GHG levels from 2020 to 2100 based on a time series of annual emissions of CO2, CH4 and N2O and a limited set of parameters. We then compared various hypothetical dietary perturbations to a “business as usual” (BAU) reference in which emissions remain fixed at 2019 levels, based on global emissions data from FAOSTAT [27].

The dietary scenarios include the immediate replacement of all animal agriculture with a plant-only diet (IMM-POD), a more gradual transition, over a period of 15 years, to a plant-only diet (PHASE-POD), and versions of each where only specific animal products were replaced.

We updated estimates of global emissions from animal agriculture using country-, species- and product-specific emission intensities from the Global Livestock Environmental Assessment Model [3], and country-specific data on primary production of livestock products from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) database FAOSTAT [27].

Based on this analysis, in 2019 (the most recent year for which full data are available), global production of animal-derived foods led to direct emissions of 1.6 Gt CO2, due primarily to energy use (as our model assumes constant overall rates of consumption, we excluded emissions due to land clearing, which are associated with agricultural expansion), 120 Mt CH4 due primarily to enteric fermentation and manure management, and 7.0 Mt N2O due primarily to fertilization of feed crops and manure management”

Submission 63

“Also another thing to consider is that if these climate change experts are right which I don’t believe they are we would be better off without Roos because they are using oxygen and also eating oxygen producing plants.

Like I say I hope you all have a look at the big picture and work out a way forward with common sense. Thank you for letting us submit our ideas.“